For this inaugural competition, essays can be on any topic pertaining to the writings of Virginia Woolf. Essays should be between 2,000 and 2,500 words in length, including notes and works cited, with an original title of the entrant’s choosing.

Essays will be judged by the officers of the International Virginia Woolf Society: Kristin Czarnecki, president; Ann Martin, vice-president; Alice Keane, secretary-treasurer; and Drew Shannon, historian-bibliographer. The winner will receive $200 and have the essay published in the subsequent issue of the Virginia Woolf Miscellany.

The literature of the 1930s is commonly characterized as anti-modernist because of the prevalence of documentary realism, political purpose, and autobiographically-inflected fiction. Moreover, the canonical literature of the decade is almost entirely authored by privileged young men, a phenomenon explored by Virginia Woolf in “The Leaning Tower.”

Interestingly, however, the 1930s bears witness to Woolf’s most daring and most commercially successful novels, The Waves and The Years respectively.

With this context in mind: how does the “modernist” and “feminist” Woolf align with the common understanding of the decade’s literary figures and their production? And, by extension, does and if
so, how Woolf’s 1930s writing sheds new light on a decade of literature otherwise dominated by the Auden and Brideshead Generations?

This issue of Virginia Woolf Miscellany, which will be published in Spring 2015, seeks contributions that explore Woolf’s relationship to the canonical literature of the 1930s, such as but not limited to:

The International Virginia Woolf Society is pleased to host its fifteenth consecutive panel at the University of Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900, scheduled for Feb. 26-28, 2015.

We invite proposals for critical papers on any topic concerning Woolf studies. A particular panel theme may be chosen depending on the proposals received.

Please submit by email a cover page with your name, email address, mailing address, phone number, professional affiliation (if any), and the title of your paper, and a second anonymous page containing a 250-word paper proposal to Kristin Czarnecki (kristin_czarnecki@georgetowncollege.edu) (one submission per person, please, devoid of any information that might identify the submitter) by Monday, Sept. 22, 2014.

The winning essay (2,500 words maximum, including all notes and Works Cited) would be published in the Virginia Woolf Miscellany and would earn a prize of $200. Time frame and details of the prize to be announced.

The meal will follow the Virginia Woolf and London’s Colonial Writers panel, which ends around 4:45 or
5 p.m. The dinner at Shaw’s is set for 6:15 p.m., and diners will have a room of their own, the Oyster Hall of Fame room.

Menu: Choice of five entrees: grilled salmon, Maryland crab cakes, chicken, vegetarian cous cous, and others. The meal will include soup, salad, entrée and dessert—as well as wines.

The cost per individual is $55. The IVWS will contribute wine, the gratuity, and subsidize $20 of the individual price for graduate students. If you mentor graduate students, consider inviting them to the dinner and bringing them along.

Please email ivwsociety@gmail.com with the subject heading “MLA DINNER” right away, as the first 30 to make reservations will be the lucky ones at the party. First come, first served!

Meanwhile the wineglasses had flushed yellow and flushed crimson; had been emptied; had been filled – Virginia Woolf